Use your brain chemicals

Use your brain chemicals

There are drugs that you can use to motivate yourself with and I'm not
talking about amphetamine or crack (a deadly form of child's play).
Instead, you can get into those energizing chemicals in your system that
get activated when you laugh...or sing...or dance...or run...or hug
someone. When you're having fun, your body chemistry changes and
you get new biochemical surges of motivation and energy.
And there isn't anything you do that can't be transformed into something
interesting and uplifting. Victor Frankl has written startling accounts of
his life in the Nazi concentration camps, and how some prisoners
created new universes unto themselves inside their own minds. It might
sound absurd, but truly imaginative people can access their inner
chemical creativity in the loneliness of a prison cell.
Don't keep trying to go outside yourself searching for something that's
fun. It's not out there anywhere. It's inside. The opportunity for fun is in
your own energy system—your synergy of heart and mind. That's where
you'll find it.
page_50
Page 51
Pro football Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton recommends looking at any
task you do as fun.
"If it's not fun," he says, "you're not doing it right."
People who get high on marijuana often find they can laugh at anything.
The problem with them is that they think this kind of "fun" is inherent in
the marijuana. It's not. The capacity for fun was already there inside of
them. The marijuana just artificially opened them up to it. But the
physical and psychological price paid for such a drugged opening is not
worth the high. (I wish I didn't know this first hand, but I do.) The price
drug users pay is this: Their self-esteem suffers because they didn't
create the fun they had—they thought the drugs did it for them. So they
keep shrinking, the more they use, into greater paranoia and
self-disgust. Soon they're using the drug just to feel normal.
William Burroughs, a former drug addict and author of Naked Lunch,
discovered something that was very interesting and bitterly amusing to
him after finally recovering from his addictions.
"There isn't any feeling you can get on drugs," he said "that you can't
get without drugs."
Make a commitment to yourself to find the natural highs you need to
stay motivated. Start by finding out what it does to your mood and
energy to laugh, to sing, to dance, to walk, to run, to hug someone, or to
get something done.
Then support your experiments by telling yourself that you're not
interested in doing anything that isn't fun. If you can't immediately see
the fun in something, find a way to create it. Once you have made a
task fun, you have solved the problem of self-motivation.

I'm reading: Use your brain chemicals